Songfacts®:

• Lambert previewed this Four The Record track during her September 8, 2011 performance at the Hulman Center on the Indiana State University campus. "The reason I love this song is because it's about how sometimes when you get your heart broken, you kinda go a little bit crazy," she confessed. "You drink too much, you smoke too much, you cut your hair... you find a rebound. Sometimes your mama, if she's like my mama, has to slap you around and say, 'Straighten up girl!'"
• This Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally and Kasey Musgraves penned song finds Lambert re-visiting the unhinged-by-a-broken-heart territory she previously sung of on cuts like "Kerosene" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend." "I have that angst naturally," she told Billboard magazine. "I always lean toward a sad song or an angry song more than a love song, but now that I am happy and in love and married, I can have the perspective of both."
• Lambert nearly didn't get to cut this tune. She knew Kacey Musgraves from her days back in Texas, and they used to write together a lot. The pair went their separate ways, but Musgraves reappeared on Lambert's radar after her appearances on Nashville Star. The country star explained. "I don't think I was supposed to be pitched the song, but her sister actually shot some pictures at mine and Blake's wedding, and she was there, too. At our rehearsal dinner, I went over and asked her, I was like, 'Are you gonna cut this song, or can I have it?' And she was like, 'I'll think about it for a couple of days.'"
  
  Musgraves granted her wish... with some strings attached. "She e-mailed me, and said, 'You can have it, if I can sing harmony,'" said Lambert. "So that's her singin' the harmonies on it - and actually, Kacey Musgraves, she has a new single out called 'Merry Go 'Round' so she's doin' great on her own now, but I had to actually beg for this song, and so I'm thankful that she gave it to me 'cause I love 'Mama's Broken Heart.'"
  
  
• The recording of Four The Record came right on the heels of Lambert's short honeymoon after marrying Blake Shelton. She went into the studio just a week after her wedding. Her goal was to have everything lined up and have the songs picked out for the album before the nuptials. It was a close run thing as it was at Lambert's rehearsal dinner that she persuaded Musgraves to allow her to cut this song, without which she felt she couldn't make the album.
• Brandy Clark told Radio.com that when Shane McAnally came into the writing session with her and Kacey Musgraves he had an idea to write a song called "Ain't Your Mama's" something, like "Ain't Your Mama's Saturday Night."
  
  "I always love when people say that, so I gravitated to that, and I think that's probably why he saved it for a day when I was in the room," she recalled. "His sister was going through this awful breakup, and his mom didn't like the way she was dealing with it, so he was telling us that story that day. Somebody, I don't even remember who said, 'Well maybe it could be that, 'Ain't Your Mama's Broken Heart.' I remember for a while we all thought maybe that was a little too plain of an idea, but we wrote it."
  
  Clark further explained how Musgraves transformed the song after their writing session. "That night, Kacey went home and put another guitar on it and some hand claps and did some really cool things, and sent it to us, and it was like a different song," she said. "It was like, 'Wow. This is really special.' And that's what Miranda heard - or her A&R person heard that. Then Miranda wanted to cut it, and she and Kacey made a deal. Kacey sang on it, and Miranda recorded it. And the rest is history."
• "Mama's Broken Heart" won the 2014 ACM Award for Single Record of the Year. It was Lambert's third win in four years in the category, having taken home the top prize in 2011 for "The House That Built Me" and in 2013 for "Over You."
  
  Lambert also won the Best Female Vocalist award for the fifth time in a row and shared the Vocal Event of the Year honour with Keith Urban for "We Were Us."
• "Mama's Broken Heart" was intended as the lead single for Kasey Musgraves' debut album. "I loved the song so much," she told NPR. "I had been a staff writer for years at that point, writing for other people and had finally felt like I was collecting songs that felt like me that I didn't wanna pitch to anyone else."
  
  The song was submitted to Miranda Lambert without Musgraves' "consent or knowledge," creating what she described as a "tricky situation." Lambert loved it and wanted it for herself, and with co-writers Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally also to consider, Musgraves ultimately let it go.
  
  Musgraves' sacrifice proved to be a blessing in disguise. "I knew I would have to go back to the drawing board. And ultimately, I'm really glad that I did, because it forced me to write 'Merry Go 'Round,' which ended up making way more sense for me anyways, aesthetically and lyrically, to kick my whole thing off," she said.
  
  "Merry Go 'Round" went on to earn Musgraves a Grammy nomination for Best Country Song.
  
  The story came full circle in 2026 when Musgraves reached out to Lambert to collaborate on a duet called "Horses and Divorces," for Kasey's sixth album, Middle of Nowhere. Musgraves told NPR the session allowed the two artists to "air out any of the old laundry."
• Shane McAnally got the idea for this song when he got caught in the middle of a family argument. He told the story on the Off The Record podcast: "I have a little sister who grew up in Texas like me and it was very much a world of you present that everything is fine even if everything is not fine. It's pretty common, especially for my generation. I was listening to my sister tell me a story about my mother and my mother telling me a story about my sister. I was in the middle and it was about a breakup my sister was having.
  
  They were both calling me saying, 'Tell your sister to stop acting so crazy.' And my sister was like, 'Mom doesn't even care that I'm going through this.' And so I went in to write with Brandy Clark and Kacey Musgraves and I just was sharing that with them and they both just instantly were like, 'Oh yeah, we know this story.' They took off. They both had had these experiences with sisters, with moms. And I had already told Brandy months before that I wanted to write a song that was 'Ain't Your Mama's Something' and we had written that down. I said, 'I don't know what it is. I think it's like 'Ain't Your Mama's Saturday Night' or 'This Ain't Your Mama's After Party,' something. I just thought there was a cool idea in that.
  
  And she said, What if this is that song? 'Ain't Your Mamas...', and I don't know how we came to Broken Heart. But Kacey really brought that thing home because she went home that night and did a garage band of this, what seemed like a super quirky song and she made it sound so interesting and did all these hand claps and she sent it to us the next morning. She had worked on it all night and she sent it to Brandy and I and I was like, 'Oh, this is a song now we've done something here.'"